Sense of Self

Mango dress
Oak + Fort mules (similar)
Small Mercies headband (similar)
Vintage necklace (similar)
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Daisy London earrings (c/o)
Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba

When stripped of everything that is familiar, who will you be? That’s a question I’ve known the answer to since I was fifteen. I talk a lot about my fifteen-year-old self because I remember the year I was fifteen as absolutely pivotal to my development as a person. So much happened that year. I started what would ultimately become my first novel. I reached the pinnacle of my competitive gymnastics career (such as it was). And I saw Paris with my own eyes for the first time. The girl I was at fifteen had an incredibly strong sense of self. She wasn’t there yet, but she knew exactly the kind of woman she wanted to be someday.

For the most part, the woman she wanted to be was me. I say for the most part because, as we enter week nine of quarantine and I truly settle into this new normal, spending all my time at home, painting, reading, journalling and constantly reinventing my go-to leggings with sweater uniform, I realise how many distractions I’ve allowed to quietly creep into my life over the years.

My fifteen-year-old self wanted to be Parisian. She wanted to be a writer and an artist. Mostly, she wanted to be fabulously stylish. The life she envisionned for herself took place in an apartment full of stacks of dog-eared books. She would, I have no doubt, be appalled to know that an older version of herself would struggle to read anything at all for a period of years. I can imagine her chastising me for all the excuses I’ve made to put off finishing my third book – for her, writing was like breathing; she couldn’t stop, couldn’t live without it.

The fact is, of course, that a having a strong sense of self doesn’t mean that you life will turn out exactly as planned. Or that you will get to have everything you want. I really do live in the book-filled apartment, but it’s an ocean away from Paris. (When I did have an apartment in Paris, there wasn’t a spare millimetre in it for books.) And while I still write often, a lot of my work is very detailed emails about disability benefit policies. I know for a fact that my younger self didn’t ever give a second thought to how she would pay the bills in her glamourous future life. If she had, she would have been forced to rethink some of her plans. But I am, essentially, the person I always wanted to be. When I give myself the time to be her.

Before quarantine, I could always find a reason to put off the creative projects that once meant so much to me until another day. There was always a walk to take, a new store to visit, a glass of wine to drink with a friend. And there was a kind of beauty in that. My life was rich and full in ways I didn’t expect as a solitary teenager. But I traded a lot of time I might have spent on things I love for that richness. I let talents that I spent years developing, painting in particular, languish. Until last month, almost two decades had passed since the last time I picked up a brush. My sense of self was unchanged. I felt like a writer and an artist, but I did very little to suggest there was any validity to that feeling.

Basically, I didn’t know how to find balance. Art and writing could always wait. In my mind, there would be time for them later. But later rarely came and in the meantime, years went by.

My fifteen-year-old self spent an inordinate amount of her time dreaming of the future. And I still do. I can envision the first days when it’s safe to live again – the people I’ll throw my arms around, the songs we’ll dance to and the travel adventures we’ll take together. But I think the moments we spend together will be all the more meaningful because I’ve had this time to come back to myself.

The thing that I don’t often say about my fifteen-year-old self is that she spent most of her time alone in her room. She did incredible things because, not necessarily by choice – she would have liked more friends and more party invitations – she had the time. In these long weeks, which we’ve all spent without so much of what we love best, my books and paints have been here. We’ve spent time together. And they’ve reminded me that time and solitude are gifts, even when they feel more like burdens to bear.

I miss my life profoundly. But that doesn’t mean that I will want to live it exactly the same way I did before. The story of my putting off so much that I loved for so long is not one that I can allow myself to revisit. When quarantine ends, I will not pack up my paintbrushes. I won’t put away my notebooks. I almost can’t believe that I ever did.

Someday, I hope that I can look back on my thirty-four-year-old self the way I look back on my fifteen-year-old self now. I want to remember how she took the time in quarantine to reacquaint herself with the woman she wanted to be and emerged with a renewed sense of self. Brighter, bolder and more creative than ever before.

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